Years before Donald Trump seized upon the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, he insistently promoted another supersized falsehood — namely that charges of Russian interference in the 2016 election were “a hoax.” His minions in the media, from Fox News down to the lowliest web trolls, have incessantly parroted that lie despite the volumes of evidence uncovered by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan investigation and the special counsel probe by Robert Mueller.
But now a fresh indictment released by the Justice Department on Sept. 4 shows that the Kremlin conspiracy to rig U.S. elections in favor of the Republican Party is not a liberal myth but a live threat — and that several of the most prominent MAGA media voices denouncing the “hoax” were themselves on the Russian payroll, taking big money.
The indictment describes in detail, with supporting documents translated from Russian, how Kremlin consultants and employees of RT, the state media outlet, directed at least $10 million in funding to a shadowy Tennessee firm known as Tenet Media.
In short, federal investigators caught “Russia, Russia, Russia” — as a mocking Trump likes to say — interfering yet again to prop up his campaign. And just as word of the indictment broke, [he] reiterated his promise to sell out Ukraine for a “peace” plan as soon as he wins election, even before he enters the White House. What Russia spent on Tenet would be pocket change compared with that return on investment.